


Marcie

by esmerome



Series: Marcie [1]
Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer (Comics 1998), Buffy the Vampire Slayer (TV)
Genre: Adulthood, Alternative Universe - FBI, Assassination, Assassination Plot(s), Assassins & Hitmen, Cat and Mouse, Cleveland, Cleveland Hellmouth, Corruption, Demons, Episode: s01e11 Out of Mind Out of Sight, Espionage, Government Agencies, Government Conspiracy, Harems, Human Trafficking, Inspired by Buffy the Vampire Slayer (TV), Invisibility, Islands, Luxury, Money, On the Run, Private islands, Prostitution, Spies & Secret Agents, Spy - Freeform, Technology, The Carribean, Trapped, Trouble In Paradise, Villains, Wealth, Witchcraft, Witches, the bahamas
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-05
Updated: 2020-12-08
Packaged: 2021-03-09 00:41:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death, Underage
Chapters: 5
Words: 5,526
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27395899
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/esmerome/pseuds/esmerome
Summary: Marcie Ross, covert government assassin and spy, is in the Bahamas to do one job: get into a party, kill one guy, disappear. She's invisible, literally, so it shouldn't be too hard. She's done it a thousand times before; things never go wrong. Except this time, they do. Majorly. Now she has a tough choice to make, with dozens of lives hanging in the balance.This is the first chapter in a series. There are no sex scenes, but sexual activity (including prostitution and human trafficking) is implied.
Series: Marcie [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2001337
Kudos: 4





	1. No Toil for the Wicked

**Author's Note:**

> When she’s introduced in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Marcie Ross is a Sunnydale High School student, turned invisible by years of students and teachers ignoring her. She beats a jock with a baseball bat, pushes a mean girl down the stairs, even kidnaps Cordelia and tries to mutilate her face. By the episode’s end, Marcie has been captured by two government agents and taken to a classroom full of other invisible people, where she opens a textbook to a chapter titled “Assassination and Infiltration.”  
> “Cool,” she says.  
> And that’s it. Through seven seasons of Buffy, five seasons of Angel, comic books, novels, video games, and an animated pilot, we never hear from Marcie again. Did she die? Go rogue? Steal millions from the Vatican? Retire to a quaint little ghost town in upstate New York? We never find out.  
> I’ve always wanted to know what happened to Marcie. Her episode could be the origin story of a superhero or a supervillain. This story is how I imagine Marcie would be living about twenty years later, in a world full of smartphones, social media, and instant global communication. She would be in her late thirties or early forties by now, and I’m sure a career of assassination and infiltration has left her with a few scars—invisible ones, in both senses of the word.  
> A note about the archive warnings: there are no sex scenes in this chapter, but sexual activity is heavily implied.

_I see you,_ Marcie thought. Her target was at the center of the fray, a head taller than anyone else, a mane of silver hair haloed around his face. He was smiling, that fond, accepting smile that never warmed his eyes. She’d felt the chill of that gaze pass through her. She was glad he’d never seen her back.

For eight months, Marcie Ross had been watching Jerry Sunshine and his friends, recording everything she could, describing everything she couldn’t. She’d taken the assignment after she’d helped blow open the biggest terrorist cell in the bureau’s history. Marcie was still riding that high when the assignment crossed her desk, and the more she read, the lower she fell, until her mood was positively subterranean. _I’m an agent of justice_ , she told herself, but it was harder and harder to believe it. How many times can you watch something terrible happen before you become an accomplice?

Last week, at the end of a routine debriefing, her boss had turned on the sonic scrambler and leaned across the table. Marcie already knew what he was going to ask.

“This is coming from very, _very_ high up the ladder,” he had said. “Immediately, if not sooner. You understand me?”

“I understand you,” she said quietly.

“I would never ask you to do this if it wasn’t essential. If it wasn’t from…” he looked upwards, lifting his chin for emphasis. She wondered what it was like to communicate with your body. To respond without saying a word. It had been so long, she’d forgotten. She folded her hands in her lap.

“We have enough to put him away for forty lifetimes,” Marcie said, shivering at an unwanted memory. “He comes back to New York in two weeks. If that’s too much time, we can extradite him from the Bahamas. A few bribes, and we could have him back in under…”

But her boss was already shaking his head, over and over again, a tight smile on his face.

“That’s how I’d like to play it. But like I said. The order is the order. His story must come to an end. I’m sorry.”

“I’m not upset. I’ve done worse.”

“Worse than Sunshine? I’d hate to see who’s worse than him.”

“You really, really would.”

An awkward silence bloomed in the air between them. Her boss smiled—he was smiling at the empty space behind her left shoulder—and straightened his stack of papers, ends down, on his desk.

“Where is he now?”

“Sunshine Cay. His island in the Bahamas. They’re throwing a birthday party for him on Saturday.”

“No toil for the wicked, eh? Can you do it after the party, make it look like an accident?”

Marcie had told him she could; now, she wasn’t so sure. She looked at the scene unfolding in the room around her. The two men closest to her, nearly unconscious with drink, were the CEO and CFO of J&R Fashions. There were two senators she’d seen here before. Had one of them given the order? Maybe that British Secretary who almost always came to these parties—only tonight, he hadn’t. What about the senior advisor to King Salman, currently talking to the founder of Nikola Computers? Or the table full of politicians, each with a girl on their lap, slurring Chinese curses Marcie wished she didn’t understand? No—it wasn’t them. Her employer would never obey an order from a rival superpower.

Then who the hell was it?

A few “appetizers” wandered through the room, girls in bikinis or even less, holding trays of food, cocaine, or champagne. None of them were a day over twenty, if even that; and down the hallway, past two demon bouncers with the blackest eyes since William Sargent, and down stairs into the basement, was another party, parallel to this one, where the girls were even younger. Marcie had seen them this morning, children some of them, and heard Jerry laughing about it on the phone.

Lava flooded Marcie’s veins. Even if she killed him, all of his customers would still exist, still find children to hurt. A red curtain fell over her eyes. She should kill every guest in this room and in the basement, give all his money to Sunshine’s girls, plus the families of the ones who…

 _Focus_ , Marcie ordered herself. _You are here to do a job. Rid the world of one evil man. Then you can play hero all you want._

Jerry Sunshine was holding court at the table in the center of the room. Maëlys Gaal, his forever girlfriend, was leaning against him, laughing performatively at the joke of some oil baron. A ring of admirers and hangers-on surrounded them, now laughing as one. One of her undercover agents was sitting there, the founder of a nonexistent app company called Psyche Unlimited. Was he recording as well? Sunshine had his own sonic and visual scramblers; she wondered if he’d read her memo, or if they’d have more useless evidence at the end of the night.

 _Focus, Marcie. You have one job to do tonight.. After that, you disappear_. She couldn’t reach Sunshine now, not with the dozens of people floating around him. She could trail after him when he went to the bathroom, assuming no one else joined him. One of her agents could try luring him away, but that was a gamble. She could wait in his suite, all night if need be. But he had three bedrooms, and sometimes he didn’t sleep in any of them; there were seventeen bedrooms in this house alone, and he’d been doing coke all night.

Jerry was getting up now, saying something like “Gotta take a piss.” The crowd answered with a boisterous laugh. Where was he going? She carefully weaved through the crowd—luckily, everyone was too drunk to notice the empty space jostling them out of the way—and followed him onto the balcony. If he walked onto the beach, past the lights, she could do it quick.

The wood of the balcony creaked under her foot. He looked behind him, frowned, then turned back and shook his head. He walked off the porch and onto the beach. Marcie followed, careful to step slowly into his footprints. Someone was probably watching him, and it wouldn’t do to attract attention.

For invisibles, Rule One was simple: _don’t be seen_. The bureau’s invisibles had been around for at least a quarter century; India and Israel already knew about the program in way more detail than the government would like. A sighting here, a leak there, and suddenly the opposition could find your entire roster, putting multiple investigations in jeopardy. With smartphones, following Rule One became harder and harder, and the training became more and more intense. Marcie used to be deliberately sloppy, pick up statues of the Virgin Mary and float them in mid-air, dare people to believe their lying eyes. She didn’t do that anymore.

As Jerry made his way down the beach, Marcie slowed her heart rate, her breathing, her footsteps, carefully treading in Sunshine’s own footprints. People could sense people, even when they couldn’t see them. The key to being truly invisible was to be less than human.

Jerry stopped just outside the halo of light from the building, coming up on a palm tree. He looked back at the party for a moment, listening and watching the revelry going on inside. After a moment, he smirked to himself and turned back around.

Marcie was already pulling out the syringe, uncapping it, throwing the plastic tip—also invisible—into the palm grove in front of them. In one fluid movement, she leapt on his back, yanked back his head by the hair, and sank the needle into his neck. She emptied the syringe before he could take a breath. He gurgled, his eyes rolled back in his head, and he fell.

Marcie got up, rolling Sunshine to his side. Very carefully, she leaned down and emptied the second syringe, this time into his chest. Then she took both syringes and threw them into the palms. They could comb through the island, but these syringes were also invisible, and made of glass; they’d break apart into nothing before anyone found them.

A chill went up her spine and down her limbs, ending in a tingle at her fingertips. Moments ago he’d been laughing in the light, his arm around Maëlys’s waist. Now he would never move again. He hadn’t suffered, not like his victims had. Not as much as he deserved.

The wind picked up, blowing hair in front of her eyes. It might not affect her vision, but it was still irritating. She looked up, pulling the hair away from her face, and was about to head to the dock when she saw the drone.

It was floating thirty feet up, rotors whirring into invisibility, black against a cloud glowing with moonlight. How long had it been there? It hovered above them, unmoved by the wind. Jerry’s body remained motionless under her feet.

Her feet.

Her footprints.

 _You’re a fool, Marcie Ross_. She’d been too focused on Jerry to look up. If a camera had been following her, it might have seen what a passel of drunk people hadn’t, noticed the footprints deepening a moment after Jerry made them. If so, she was fucked.

The drone descended.

She wouldn’t run. She wouldn’t even breathe. Breathing would violate Rule One. Worst-case scenarios flitted through her mind. The drone might have a thermal camera, sonar, electric field sensors, or some new space-age imaging technology she didn’t even know by name. If it did, she was already dead, and running wouldn’t help. But if it was just a camera, she had a chance. She might live.

The drone hovered twenty feet up, its glass lens shining with reflected light from the party. A flash blinded her. It held for five seconds, ten seconds, then the drone shot up and sped away.

“Jerry?” someone yelled out behind her. A red-faced man was coming down the beach, smiling a loopy drunken smile. Marcie tiptoed away from the body. Little specks of sand were already clinging to her, appearing to float in midair. Then again, this guy was so plastered, he might not even notice if she was fully visible. He came closer.

“I just got—” the red-faced man paused. Marcie backed up, slowly, the wind whipping a few more hairs out of her braid.

“Jerry, man, you okay?” He bent down. Marcie kept backing up, toe-heel, toe-heel, slowly, slowly, very slowly. The red-faced man was yelling before he stood up. She watched him turn, watched him get ready to run, his arms waving overhead.

Marcie looked around. The sand was dark all around her; for the first time that night, she was truly alone. She ran.


	2. At the Doors of the Temple

Marcie was halfway to the dock when she realized the agents were going to kill her. It would be quick, for them: they would throw her overboard and she would vanish between the waves, never to be missed or even thought of. Another loose end tied up forever.

She looked behind her, at the harsh lights of the complex, the unsettled voices rising from the beach, the men on cell phones heading toward her in groups and pairs. She couldn't see who they were in the darkness. The undercover agents could be anywhere in that crowd. If they weren't, they'd be out soon. And they'd find her, even if she swam out to sea. How could you hide from someone who could track you by GPS? Someone who, in all likelihood, had a drone following you right now?

Marcie looked up, but saw nothing but clouds and stars. That didn't mean nothing was there. She ran into a grove of palm trees and was still considering her options--she could kill the agents, take their boat to Florida, give herself a little head start--when she saw a side door open on the complex. A large man came out, followed by a dozen girls. A few held hands, or hugged themselves against the wind. 

Marcie knew instantly where they were going. All thought of self-preservation vanished in that instant. In an hour or so, the island would be crawling with law enforcement. They had to get rid of the girls quickly, and they would. In the course of her life, she had stood and watched all manner of evil things. She could not stand by for this. 

Marcie ran up the central hill of the island, across the sundial and along the narrow path. The temple loomed above her, its golden dome shining in the moonlight. Two large demons flanked the entrance, one dolphin gray, the other striped and brown. The striped demon was staring right at her, smiling. _Shit_. Some demons could see or sense her, often the biggest and strongest ones. She reached into her jacket.

What happened next only entered her memory as flashes of movement. The striped demon opened his mouth; a jet of venom flashed through the air where her head had been a second before. She ducked and shot the taser straight at his chest. He flinched, as if stung by a bee, and flicked the prong off his chest. 

"Claude Rains, I presume?" Stripes said in a deep, guttural voice, walking to Marcie with large, confident strides. His partner looked at him quizzically, mouth agape.

"Huh?" Gray barked, his voice about as loud a jumbo jet. Stripes flinched and looked back at him, which gave Marcie enough time to bring out the necklace from her pants pocket. The necklace hovered in midair, a simple leather cord attached to a small marble, only this marble was glowing with a soft, pulsing light. Gray stared at it, his pupils widening until his irises were a tiny rim around two black disks.

"...can't be acting like this while..." Stripes was saying, and a walkie talkie crackled on his hip, but when he locked eyes on the marble, his speech ceased. it didn't matter anymore.

Marcie said the chant as she'd been taught, phoneme by phoneme. She couldn't even remember what language it was in, whether it was demonic, ancient, or constructed. Not that it mattered right now; what mattered is if it worked. Magic was supposed to have left the world, but she had to try anyway.

"Do not open the doors of the temple, no matter who asks you to," she murmured when the incantation was done. "When the girls come here, do not touch them. Tell your commanders that all has gone according to plan. Then throw the girl's guards into the sea. Forget that you've been told. Forget who told you. Let it be so."

"Let it be so," both demons droned. Marcie sighed and pocketed the necklace, careful to entirely conceal the string in her pocket. The guards, and the line of girls trailing behind them, were now coming up the narrow path; they'd be here in a minute or two. She walked carefully behind the temple and started to run.

Helicopters were flying through the sky from seemingly all directions, some with searchlights on the churning waves. Maybe one of the girls had made a break for it; if she had, godspeed to her. There had been a few speedboats docked at the northeastern side of the island, just out of sight of the temple. Maybe, if Marcie got there quickly enough, there would be one left.

There wasn't. The dock was empty, save a small rowboat--not enough to fit more than three or four people, if even that. If the helicopters, drones, and sharks didn't get to them first.

She was running back to the temple when the girls started screaming. The sky was full of helicopters now, dozens of them zooming overhead. How had they come here so quickly? She must have killed Sunshine twenty minutes ago, if even that. She ran harder. There could be a drone somewhere above, one laser-focused on the GPS tracker inside her ankle. There was so very little time. What if--

Three girls, running down the hill, scattered her thoughts. Girls were running everywhere now, scrambling down the hillside, running pell mell across the island. She should have seen that coming, but she didn't. "This way!" she bellowed, and started running. "There's a boat!"

The girls followed, even though they couldn't see her. "Keep running!" She yelled a few times. "It's at the dock!"

Someone was getting into the boat and fiddling with the rope. Adrenaline surged through Marcie's body. She ran up and saw one of the caretakers. The red curtain descended over her eyes, and when it came back up, the boat was empty again, save for a satellite phone.

"In here," one of the girls called out to her friends. Marcie jumped aside as the girls got into the boat; they were so small, it fit six of them. They untied the rope and started rowing away; one reached down and brought life jackets to them. A helicopter searchlight passed inches from them; they rowed away, not with all the helicopters and speedboats everywhere. But at least they weren't in that horrible building; they had a phone; they had a chance.

Marcie watched them. The cut between here and Atlantis Island was calm as glass; there wasn't much there, just a town and a canning factory. They might not get there

Marcie was watching them when a large, meaty hand fell on her shoulder.


	3. Way Down in the Holy Ocean

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Marcie struggles to free herself from a tense situation.

Marcie pulled, but the arm around her neck only squeezed tighter. White spots opened across her field of vision; she dragged her feet, kicked, dug in her nails. Nothing worked. Why didn't they shoot her in the head, right here? Her blood was just as invisible as the rest of her; her brains must be as well. Maybe they were waiting until they were in the ocean. Dead bodies were heavy to carry and hard to explain. And a dead, invisible body on a pedophile's private island would raise too many questions. Questions nobody wanted to answer.

She felt for the necklace in her pocket, willing herself to stay conscious. It only worked on demons, but they could be demons. They'd taken away her taser and most of her other weapons. She had to try something.

"Let go!" She tried to scream, but the scream came out as a gurgle. The man's arm tightened around her neck. In a heartbeat or two she would pass out. Her hand fumbled for her pocket—

Marcie blinked and she was being carried, over a guy’s shoulder, across a dock. “That’s her, huh?” said a man’s voice, probably the same man who'd been talking to Jerry Sunshine about artificial intelligence. She ventured a look. He was wearing thermal-imaging glasses, and staring right at her. He waved.

She fell, wriggling out of the man’s grasp, and caught her ankle. The guard's bent down for her—he, too, was wearing the glasses—and grabbed her by one hand.

“You’re coming with me,” he growled.

Rather than answer, Marcie sank her knife, three times, into his thigh. 

For a moment he didn't react, and she wondered if some old invincibility shield protected him. She sank the blade again, and twisted. He groaned, finally. She let herself fall, back-first, into the water, the bullet singing past her forehead as she fell.

A voice boomed somewhere high above the water. American accent, male, amplified by loudspeaker. A bright light shone through her eyelids; Marcie opened her eyes, felt the sting of the salt water, and saw a light hovering in midair, focused somewhere else. The voice boomed out again, followed by some kind of siren.

When she resurfaced, away from the dock, she saw what it was: a helicopter whirring overhead, spotlight focused on the agent in the boat. His thermal glasses were off now. Two more speedboats were closing in on him, red lights flashing.

"FEDERAL AGENTS!" The man on the speedboat was yelling, reaching in his pocket. "FEDERAL AGENTS, F-B-I--"

A bullet hit him square in the chest. Marcie was in the water before he fell. She must be bleeding, or have some of his blood on her; she hadn’t stopped to check. If the sharks couldn't see her, they could smell her just fine. Well, there was nothing to do about it now but take a chance. If she stayed, she was surely dead 

A beam of light swung across the waves. Marcie plunged as deep as she could; something small and slimy wriggled past her arm. It was a quarter mile swim to Atlantis Cay. The water was usually calm, but once in awhile a rip current came through drag everything out to open ocean. A hedge fund manager had died that way, plus a few girls who tried to escape. She wouldn't think about that now. She would think about getting to Atlantis Cay, disabling the tracker in her ankle, going anywhere but here. Anywhere they couldn't find her.

Marcie surfaced again, took a deep breath, and plunged.


	4. Dreaming, 1997

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Marcie recalls the early days of her training in the FBI's SHUT-EYE program, and some of the friends she made there.

"Marcie! I didn't see you there!"

Marcie fake-laughed, as did everyone else at the table. It was already an old joke, even a month into her training. Marcie had a feeling it would only get older.

"Hey, Pessoa," Marcie said, scooting over on the bench. They had assigned seats to keep from bumping into each other, but Pessoa sat wherever she wanted. Marcie wondered how she'd ever become invisible, this exuberant girl so full of life, she just had to share it with other people. Most of the invisibles were quiet things, insane or nearly so, a lot like Marcie herself. Francesca Pessoa was neither quiet nor insane; on her first night in the dorm, she'd found a guitar, tuned it—not correctly—and narrowly avoided an unholy beating for singing "Wonderwall" until four in the morning. At least, Marcie thought it was Wonderwall, though she couldn't make out the words—just the volume. Pessoa insisted the next day that it was a song of her own invention.

"Hey yourself, Marcie," Pessoa said, her voice glinting at the edges. Marcie could almost see her wink as she slid next to her. Pessoa's arm wrapped around her shoulders.

"You hear the good news?" Pessoa said. "They're bringing us a new movie tomorrow night. Special treat. Reward for our good behavior. Maybe we'll have a great Halloween after all. Agent Gutierrez says we can dress up in costumes, if we all ace his next test."

"What movie?" asked a boy across the table.

"I dunno. Some action movie on a plane. I guess they want us desensitized to the real thing before we, you know—"

"You don't get desensitized to that!" shrieked Angela, a former popular girl who'd been frozen out at the direction of her school's Queen Bee. "I should know, believe me!"

"I bet you didn't even murder her," Pessoa said, stealing a fry off Marcie's plate. "Your nemesis or whoever. Just because she went missing doesn't mean you're responsible."

"You know I can't answer that."

"Yeah, because you didn't do it."

"Maybe I did."

"No, you didn't."

"Are you jealous?" Angela said with a nasty, smiling inflection.

"Of you? Hardly. The first time they give you a wetwork assignment, you're gonna crumple like wet Kleenex. You watch out."

Maybe Pessoa was rolling her eyes, maybe not. Marcie was very conscious of Pessoa's arm across her shoulders, and the girl's hair, which was still long,

"Why not? We always have a nice summer, don't we?" Marcie said. Laughter rippled across the table.

"What about you, Pessoa?" asked Finlay, an ex-homeschooled kid who'd turned invisible after being frozen out by his entire family. "Are you a stranger to 'wetwork?' You ever kill anyone?"

"Me? Fuck no. I'm a total virgin." Pessoa took another fry off Marcie's plate, and Marcie turned—just in time to glimpse chewed potato through her open mouth. Marcie yacked and put her hand in front of Pessoa's mouth, pushing her away without thinking.

"Hey! Mmmow! Wreyoff!" Pessoa said through a mouthful of food.

"Close your mouth when you're eating, then!" Marcie said.

"Don't tell me what to do!" Pessoa wrenched herself free while knocking twice on the table—twice for no, or in this case, no more. Marcie pulled her hand away.

"You see what I have to deal with?"

"No," they all said in unison, which was how you answered any question that started with "You see...?" when you were in the SHUT-EYE program. The teachers had learned that quickly. A low laugh rippled out from/across the table.

"I think I wanna specialize in infiltration," Pessoa said. "Espionage, surveillance, wiretapping, observation. Real spycraft shit. You know?"

"Surveillance is deadly boring. A lot of sitting around waiting for something to happen. Listening to bullshit conversations for ten hours, waiting for someone to say the one thing you need to put them away. Plus you can't pee."

"Wouldn't it be funny if you did, though?" Pessoa said, and started giggling maniacally. "Oh my God, can you imagine? Bunch of mobsters playing poker and all of a sudden in the corner there's this jet of water, like, sssssss..."

"Okay, Stephen King," Marcie grumbled, turning back to her food.

"Omigod--you read him too?" Pessoa said, oblivious to the joke. "I heard he came out with a new book, like, a month ago." Pessoa's seat creaked as she leaned forward "Did you read it yet?"

"You heard, or you guessed?" Finlay asked. 

"I mean, I'm kinda psychic, so--"

"So you guessed Stephen King published another book?" Marcie said, a suppressed laugh in her voice. "That's like predicting that Marilyn Manson is going to do something to try and shock people."

They talked for awhile about music, who had it, who was smuggling it in. It was 1997, the summer of Spice Girls and Backstreet Boys, and though everyone professed to hate that stuff, they'd nearly / They weren't supposed to have media, and they certainly weren't supposed to go off-site to get it/for any reason, but it happened. Someone had liberated a copy of OK Computer from a local CD shop, and they'd taken turns listening to it on a CD player at very low volume, each sharing one pair of headphones.

"What about you, Marcie?" Finlay asked finally. "What do you want to do, when you're finished with your training?"

Marcie stared at a poster on the far wall of the lunch room. Someone had hung an inspirational poster on it showing a mountain, with the word "COMMITMENT" printed below it. Marcie had read the subtitle a million times, even if she couldn't make it out from here: "Once you have resolved to do a thing, do it with all your strength."

"It's not about this or that specialty for me," Marcie said carefully. "It's more about becoming something greater than I could ever be as just myself. I could be an agent of something higher, like...justice, or a voice for the helpless, or even just revenge. I don't know." Marcie twirled her fork on her lunch tray. "If I'm nobody in most people's minds, I could represent something great and eternal. Better to be a vessel than a nobody."

"That's quite high-minded of you, Ross," Pessoa said with a laugh. "Weren't you all Psycho Betty when you came here?"

"Who wasn't Psycho Betty when they came here," said Finlay. "I'm honestly surprised I let my whole family live—if they'd left me there much longer, though...Remember Hootch? He clawed out his principal's eyes with his fingernails and ripped out his tongue."

"Whatever happened to Hootch?" Marcie asked.

"Probably nothing good. I heard he was behind that Nerve Gas thing in—"

"Shhh!" Pessoa said, dinging her fork with her fingernail. It was pointing to the agent who'd just walked through the door, a dour-faced man with a close-cut haircut. Soon they were all twirling their forks. Several students had disappeared in the last few weeks alone, and when asked they weren't told what happened—the line, which they could all repeat verbatim, was "That student isn't here anymore." No further clarification. The 'nerve gas thing' was a news story, smuggled in by a student, where a white separatist was gassed in his sleep—along with his wife, thirteen year-old son, and infant daughter. Since they'd had a unit on infiltrating domestic terrorist threats, they were sure that a student had escaped and gone rogue.

"I'm sure he's doing very well/he's sunning himself in the Bahamas somewhere. Drinking a daiquiri in between journeys/long, languid stays /in/ to the women's locker room."

"Have you ever been to a woman's locker room, Finlay?" Pessoa said acidly. "If so, you'd know it was about as erotic as a tonsillectomy. And smells worse."

"That's not what it's about," Marcie said. "They want to go anywhere they're not welcome."

"Typical." Marcie could almost see Pessoa rolling her eyes.

"What do you mean, typical? That's what we're all learning to do right now, isn't it?"

The agent was walking through the apparently empty room, his eyes sweeping across the tables, lingering now and then at a fork suspended in midair, or the glimpse of masticated food inside a still-chewing mouth. Most conversation had stopped or faded to a low murmur. Pessoa rapped the table long, long, long, short-short, Morse for the number eight, which meant, in truncated invisible-ese, "Let's talk about this later." A few solitary knocks answered her; once for yes, twice for no.

The SHUT-EYE kids / invisibles had quickly developed their own patois, with code words and even code inflections to compensate for the lack of body language. There were many, many forms of sarcasm, and knocking on tables, on desks, on anything; once for yes, twice for no, with different inflections to convey different ideas. They'd quickly learned morse code, and how to hold pens in certain ways, and created many abbreviations for different emotions: OK, of course, YR for Yeah, right, and the letter X, long short-short long, which had about a million meanings and emotional shades, depending on the day and the context. Most of them were sexual or romantic, but it could also mean boredom, ironic detachment, or hopeless despair.

"How's everybody doing today?" the agent asked. A mumbled chorus of "Fine" and "Great" met him, as a few mouths opened to show masticated food. The agent paled, then turned a light shade of green, and left. A suppressed laugh rippled across the room.

"I guess we're invisible for a reason, huh?" Pessoa said. It was an old joke, and it was only gonna get older. Glum sounds of agreement greeted her words.


	5. Controversial Financier’s Death Becomes Viral Video Sensation

A viral video appears to show the final moments of financier Jeremy Sunshine, 63, who died on Friday of a suspected cardiac arrest, the Associated Press can report.

On Saturday morning, “Guy Incognito,” a videographer with tens of millions of followers on YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram, uploaded a drone flyover of Mr. Sunshine’s private island, Sunshine Cay. The video, apparently taken on Friday night, approaches the island from the southwest corner, making a tour of the island, including the mysterious temple at its summit.

Approximately 28 minutes into the video, the camera focuses on a man with short gray hair leaving the beach house—a sprawling complex on the southeast side of the island—and walking to a grove of trees. A few seconds later, he stumbles back, his head jerks back, and he falls to the sand, apparently unconscious. The camera zooms in on his body, which lies unmoving in the sand, for almost two minutes, before zooming out and flying away.

Three hours after the video was posted, it already had 70,000 views on YouTube. On Twitter, the hashtag #GoodbyeSunshine was used over 200,000 times by Sunday evening. The man bears a striking resemblance to Mr. Sunshine, and numerous videos have apparently used various video analyses to confirm or deny the man’s identity. As of press time, the man’s identity was not known for certain.

Mr. Sunshine, born Jeremy Michael Sonnenshein in Long Island, 1958, was a mysterious figure in the world of finance, famous for funding multiple private symposiums on experimental psychology, transhumanism, and the “power of human potential,” Sunshine was often photographed in the company of CEOs, politicians, and members of the British royal family.

Rumors swirled online that Sunshine facilitated sexual relations between wealthy, powerful men and prostituted girls, some as young as twelve. The FBI declined to comment on whether or not they were investigating Mr. Sunshine at the time of his death, but anonymous sources inside the department affirmed that there was an investigation, which had been discontinued for “unknown reasons.” In a deposition, Sunshine denied all charges.

An official spokesman for The Sunshine Trust, one of Mr. Sunshine’s investment companies, released a brief statement on Monday morning. “Jeremy Sunshine passed away on Friday night on Sunshine Cay, his island in the Bahamas. No further details are available at this time.”

Calls to The Sunshine Trust were not returned at press time.


End file.
